‘US, UK disgusted only when their enemies chop people’s heads off’

After ignoring beheadings by radical jihadists in Syria for years, as well as legal executions by their Middle Eastern allies, it’s a little hypocritical for Obama and Cameron to voice outrage at ISIS now, antiwar activist Michael Raddie told RT.

RT:What do you make of David Cameron’s response? Should he have
said more?

Michael Raddie: There was a lot of untruth in
what he said. One of the things he said was that the “UK was a
peaceful nation” which is a completely ludicrous lie. But in
terms of his response to the latest beheadings, if that’s what
they were, he is being cautious at the moment but I think there
is a real danger of huge mission creep here. The military, they
are all saying they need boots on the ground to fight ISIS, or
IS.

That’s already happened with the US. We know that there are US
troops, US Special Forces in Iraq. But there is also the problem
with UK Special Forces being in Syria. Obviously, that’ll be a
full on invasion. So, not only is there still threats, and he
basically said that everything is still on the table in terms of
what could be done inside Syria; there are threats to invade
Syria, threats to bomb Syria.

This is obviously not going to work. The attitude of the UK is
predominantly and historically has been to collude with radical
Islam. For more than 50 years Britain has colluded with all these
groups. It seems to have backfired in their face at the moment,
although even today people have been very sceptical about the
authenticity of these beheading videos.

So, I am not sure what the plan is. I still think that deep down
their aim is to get into Syria and to force a regime change and
remove Assad from power. Obviously they can put in their own
government, their own vassal puppet government, who would be more
willing to allow control of resources, to allow Qatari natural
gas pipelines through the region. It’s all deep geopolitics. The
fundamental aim is still to remove Assad from the Syrian
government.

RT:What's the way out of this if it’s not a
military solution?

MR: Even back to the coup in Iran in1953 - that
was born out of Americans and British wanting to protect their
own interest, interests of corporations, and their oil companies,
that were nationalized when Prime Minister [Mohammad] Mosaddegh
was elected into power.

So the British and Americans with collusion from the CIA, they
rounded up all the local radicals in the area, and they formed a
coup, there were riots in the streets. They were paid to riot
effectively, to create the coup. Everyone in the British secret
service and American CIA were involved in that coup. Obviously
that meant the installation a pro-western friendly Shah
government with all the terrible implications for the people of
Iran.

That kind of playbook happened subsequent times. You just have to
look at our allies in the region. Saudi Arabia, to which
successive British governments have been quite happy to go over
for arms deals and things like this. And it’s Saudi Arabia, who
in terms of beheading people, they do far more beheadings than
ISIS has ever done. But it seems that we are quite happy, we are
not disgusted by Saudi Arabia when they chop people’s heads off,
it’s only when our enemies do.

But this has been happing in Syria for three of four years now.
And we were never disgusted or horrified, and it was never in the
corporate media in the west when Syrian civilians or soldiers
from the Syrian Arab army were being killed in this way. So it
seems a little bit hypocritical for [Barack] Obama and [David]
Cameron to start claiming that they are disgusted now, having
financed these radical jihadists for two or three years in Syria.

RT:How do you think we can stop more
hostages from being killed?

MR: There are countries like France which
actually just paid the ransom vents. I don’t know whether that is
necessarily the right thing to do, but obviously all the French
hostages have been released. It’s unlikely that British and
Americans will ever do that. That would set a wrong kind of
precedent. But the obvious thing to do is to withdraw funding
from all these jihadists. And the funding is obviously coming
from countries, which is like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But they’ve
also been receiving arms and training from – the French admitted
they’ve been arming the Syrian rebels. And the British have been
training them and they’ve been supplying them with so-called
non-lethal military equipment. This is been happening for three
years now. So the first step would be to cut off the flow of
these arms, and the training, and the support that the western
governments are giving anti-Syrian forces. That would be number
one.

And following that I think there is obviously a lots still to do
in Iraq, in terms of stabilizing that country. I think one of the
aims with the West in Iraq was to remove the [Nouri al-] Maliki
government possibly because there was no formal agreement to
allow US troops to stay in the country with immunity from
prosecution. That is why Obama actually pulled the troops out.
There wasn’t any genuine altruistic offer on his part. That was a
cynical move to take the troops out only because they were not
allowed any impunity of prosecution. That was Maliki’s decision
early on, and his government. He had to go. Possibly for that
reason, possibly for others.

The Kurdish region in the north, obviously they are doing deals
with western companies already. They are already on side with the
West. We don’t mind doing deal with those guys because we have
good contracts. We are managing to extract oil very cheaply. So
we are quite happy to deal with the Kurds, which is why the West,
including the UK, is arming the Kurdish region in the hope that
this would form another proxy war and we can rid our enemies by
the Kurds.

But historically we’ve always let the Kurdish region down. The
Kurdish people have been promised so much in the past and they
have always been let down. And I don’t doubt that this would
happen again as soon as the west has tied up all the contracts in
the region. Then the Kurdish people would never win their
autonomy and independence.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.